[Author’s note for 2022: This essay was presented in March of 2006, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region, at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. I am revisiting my older ideas as based from my thealogical (study of Goddess), birth-based scholarly work. The notion of society moving towards a sacred economy is more pressing than ever.]
I note my ideas on this theme predate the work of Charles Eisenstein and his notion of “Sacred Economics.” I had not heard of him or his work at the time of my own ponderings. Rather, I was immersed in considering the embodied, ecofeminist energetics of freely birthing mothers, alongside my studies of the ancient matrifocal Minoan-Cretan culture, as based in my community-based birth work as a lay midwife, knowing the sacredness of birthing mothers as contiguous to honouring our human interrelationship with Mother Earth as our primary matrix—as the Minoans did. I see the Minoans as having lived a sacred economy template in a spiritualized, communal distribution of foods, goods, and resources, towards all citizens through their architectural Goddess complexes. I am mindful of this communal, communing economy as related to what Genevieve Vaughan names the “Maternal Gift Economy,” as I note here in.
Though I see gift economy as key, I would say a “sacred economy” goes one step further in being an activated gift economy that is both practically and spiritually grounded in cosmological matricentric, Goddess worldviews. In the case of the Minoans, a whole culture ritualized mother-love, social care, and life-based spirituality that honours reciprocity with the land through architecture which ceremonially transmitted and distributed the abundance, love, and gifts of Mother Earth, honouring interconnected human and earth-based cycles of birth, life, death, and regeneration. Archeologist Marija Gimbutus highlighted the life-giving, Mother Earth-based principle of regeneration as the sacred, organizing matri-ethics of the Minoans, along with other Neolithic cultures she unearthed, and named them a “Civilization of the Goddess.”
I see now how my notion of sacred economy, as embedded and embodied by both birthing mothers and the ancient Minoans, was somewhat radical if not wildly interdisciplinary. I thus spiral back to my original thearia, where we are all children of nature.
Towards a Sacred Economy
This essay formulates a theory of sacred economy as related to the theme of “encountering Motherhood Divine.” Mine is more a poetic, intuitive, academic imagining, or IMAGE-ing—then what might normally constitute a theory of linear, rationalist proportions. My seeing-sensing of is based in gifts of the mystic-mantic, where I draw from a trans-disciplinary, multi-lateral use of information. IN-FORM-ATION. To work with an already asked question in North American feminist studies of religion of: “does female divinity, form, inform, transform women themselves, and gendered constructions of social and cultural power?” (Christ & Plaskow, 1992; Daly, 1978). I extend this question to “how does female divinity form, inform, transform, not only women, but economic and ecological relationships, such that ecological sustainability could be achieved?” (Gross & Radford Reuther, 2001).
Economy, in its etymology from the Greek: translates as household management, where eco is oikos—meaning house, and the onomy is its management. How do we “manage” our “house”? What is the nature of this house and its management? Living in post-colonial nation states as North Americans, we live in a paternalistic house of liberal humanism, managed by neo-classical economics, driving a military industrial complex. The economic contract of the ‘corporation’ is for profit without limits—the social and spiritual factors of eco-nomy, its use of people, resources, and land, its use of the human and non-human world as life itself is lost. And then there is the use of women as mothers within this eco-nomy, women who literally produce other beings in the reproductive and unpaid social labour of mothers, operating within the locus of the private residences we call home (Bobel, 2004; de Beauvoir, 1949; Maushart,1998; O’Reilly, 2004; Rich, 1976).
In order to envision sacred economy, I borrow from what environmental thinker Allan Greenbaun calls “Cosmological Thought as Environmental Intervention” (1999). According to Greenbaum, cosmological intervention is that tradition of popular and academic environmental thought that concentrates on cosmological issues. This tradition connects the environmental crisis with anthropocentric and mechanistic cosmologies, or worldviews, and addresses the crisis through cosmological re-constructions. Cosmological intervention prioritizes environmental problems as metaphysical, rather then just technical or moral. These interventions can act as evocative and imaginary techniques.
Ecofeminist theorists have deconstructed mechanistic cosmologies as a metaphysics of patriarchal power relations in regards to both ‘women’ and ‘nature.’ At times misunderstood to be the actual conflation of women with nature, ecofeminism articulates the ‘nature’ of Western, European-derived, hierarchical dualistic thinking in: culture v. nature, men v. women, and mind v. body divides. Ecofeminism grasps the devastating impact of this worldview with respect to social, colonial, and ecological exploitation, in particular regards to gender (Eaton & Lorentzen, 2003; Griffin, 1978; Merchant, 1980; Jordan, 2002, 2004; Starhawk, 1990).
In a previous paper entitled, “Goddessing 101: A Maternal Cosmology” (2005), I hypothesize the link between what I call “goddess cosmology” and ecological sustainability. Drawing from the emergent academic field of Women’s Spirituality, and its affiliations with ongoing feminist studies in religion, I supposition the emergence of “goddess cosmology” as a culturally transformative response—a cosmological intervention—within the politics of feminism and the environmental movement itself. This goddess cosmology in its North American context is diverse, subversive, relational—a multi-faceted social / cultural / thea-logical response (Birnbaum, 2005; Gadon, 1989; Spretnak, 1982). Goddess cosmology is based in feminist critiques of gender within hyper-masculinist, paternalistic religious and spiritual discourses and practices. Such cosmology reframes the human place within the non-human, and more-than human, world—in a re-constructive worldview of deeply inter-relational practices that honour and arise from female divinity. These practices ostensibly work in service to life and life-giving processes. Mother and goddess reflect both spiritual and lived beings, with attending attention to death, dissolution, and cyclic renewal. Goddess cosmology pays attention to the embodied and embedded self in relation to others, surroundings, place, the Earth, and attention to the beings that are drawn from for human needs such as plant and mineral beings, trees, rock and animal for shelter and nourishment, drawn from also for beauty in the aesthetic and spiritual life of a community.
The work of archeologist Marija Gimbutus made such claims for a kind of goddess cosmology that linked the Neolithic European communities that she unearthed to regenerative, ecologically sustainable economies of use, over thousands of years. Gimbutus acknowledged the Neolithic cultures she unearthed as displaying obvious patterns of matriarchal social structure (1989, 1999). German philosopher Heide Göttner-Abendroth (2004) bridges cultural history with current anthropological research (Sanday, 2004) to build theory in a field she names, “matriarchal studies.” At risk of generalizing, matriarchal societies at the economic level—in the management of home—are most often agricultural with egalitarian and non-accumulating economies. Women have the power of distribution of the goods of the clan. There is no private property and advantages and disadvantages concerning the accumulation of goods are mediated by social rules of redistribution of wealth. Deity, if it is viewed as such, reflects worship of the earth, maternal source and embodiment.
In responding to the AAR call of “Religious Encounters with Modernities,” I play with cosmological intervention in the subtopic: creation of religious utopias in the past to contrast with the confusion of the present.
I IMAGE, and imagine, through my series of images, a hypothesized goddess cosmology, where one encounters Motherhood Divine in the once matrilocal and matrilineal Neolithic, Bronze-age Minoan civilization, a culture whose contents are already within spiritual feminist and pre-historical religious study and concern.
Along with morphology, morphology as the study of forms, the structure of things, I will rest in a central FORM within this IN-FORM-ATION, for a theory of sacred economy. The form I rest in is that of placenta in my own strange way to make a theory, this making-strange of theory, may not be a theory (theoria) at all, but what other name for it? My thea-ria, thea as in goddess, in contemplation from and with SHE, she who gives birth, who gives and regenerates life in continual creation.
Additional note-quote on theoria (Greek):
“…..in Neoplatonism, the creative power of the cosmos is contemplation (theoria) and intellection (noesis), therefore divine praxis is theoria….contemplation may be compared to the mystery-rites (teletai).”
The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Platonic and Pythagroean Philosophy, by Dr. Algis Uzdavinys. http://www.dictionaryofspiritualterms.com/public/Glossaries/terms.aspx?ID=358
(To be continued)
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